Content Testing
Oct 23, 2023
10 Tests to Run With Intelligems Testing Suite
The most impactful tests using Intelligems suite of tools.
Drew Marconi
In the days leading up to the sunset of Google Optimize at the end of September, I promoted a Twitter series about the various types of tests Intelligems can run as an alternative – and as added bonuses – for Shopify store owners. At Intelligems, we’ve run 1000+ AB tests for Shopify stores and have found ~$200m in incremental margin – in other words, we know the importance of testing. In case you missed out - here’s a little recap of some of the most impactful tests we’ve seen our customers run:
Theme Tests
Landing Page (and Redirect) Tests
Welcome Offers
Copy and Headline Tests
Image Tests
PDP Layout and Template Tests
HTML Edits
Personalized Discount Links With Intelligems Campaigns
Test a Gift With Purchase Offer
Abandoned Cart Flows
Read below for more details on how to run these tests.
Theme Tests
Using our theme testing feature, you can take 2 (or more) different iterations of your Shopify theme and split the traffic between them in real time – this is also a feature that is pretty unique to Intelligems. The seamless nature of theme tests ensures that your customers continue to have a positive experience on your site, and they are equally easy to set up (easily done in 2 minutes!). If you’re building new pages one at a time, you can use Intelligems to set up multiple redirect tests for individual pages. If you're testing an entirely new theme, send a portion (maybe 10% to reduce risk) of the traffic to the new theme and keep the other portion going to the original one to track in real-time which one performs better.
Once you have your test live, Intelligems keeps track of your different visitors, how they convert, and tracks their orders. This allows you to gain insight into revenue per visitor, profit per site visitor, and more.
Landing Page (and Redirect) Tests
Landing pages are a great way to iterate on customer acquisition funnels, and to test out new offers that can help you boost growth and margin. As I’ve mentioned before, landing pages are one of the best ways to create a smooth customer path to purchase, increase conversions, and decrease the cost of acquisitions. To make sure you’re putting the best one up, you need to be testing them. Setting them up using Intelligems is easy:
Set up a duplicate version (or 3) of your original landing page
Put the different URLS into Intelligems (up to 5 variants!)
Let the Intelligems team know if you want to target the test (e.g. to mobile devices only)
Preview the test, and go!
You can test and measure the impact of different offers on these landing pages to help you find the sweet spot – What’s the right combination of products/price/discount messaging that’s going to maximize the expected profit from that visitor? What’s unique about Intelligems testing is that we track all the economics you care about in addition to conversion – including AOV, units per transaction, revenue per visitor, profit per visitor, discount usage, product mix, and raw export of orders and customers.
There are tons of other ways we’ve seen Shopify stores leverage these redirect tests. For example, a 9-figure brand is currently using our suite of tools to test whether it’s most effective to link their Klaviyo email chains to their home page, PDPs, or collection pages. It all comes down to what works best for your business.
Test your Welcome Offers
Countless brands give away 10, 15, or even 20% on first orders – all offers which haven’t been tested. This is where Intelligems steps in. At some point in the past few years, a pop-up offer for new customers became the norm for e-commerce merchants. You’re likely familiar with these types of discounts – think about ones like, “give us your email, and we’ll give you 15% off.” The logic on the brand’s end is usually something along the lines of “having an extra email address on my list is worth X amount of money, so the tradeoff is worth it.” However, there are a few misconceptions here:
Not all emails are created equal! If you’re simply dividing your revenue by the number of emails, you’re going to overstate the value of the email.
This method lets you make "friendly fraud" easy, as customers can just put in a new email and get the offer twice!
Employing this method really doesn’t let you see if your offers are actually adding profit and contribution margin!
This is why it’s essential to test your offers in order to measure the incremental effect. To do this effectively, you should be experimenting with different values (and even no offer at all) to track how these different cohorts contribute to your overall profit. With Intelligems, running this kind of test is easy – we integrate with your pop up (whether it’s Klaviyo, Attentive, Postscript, Privy, you name it), and test different discount amounts to help you track the impact to conversion, revenue, margin, and LTV. Through the tests we’ve run so far, we’ve found 5% gains to profits for Shopify stores. One of our clients – Skull Riderz – is currently testing a $20 off vs. $15 off vs. no offer to measure how the different values impact their acquisition funnel and first order profitability.
Copy and Headline Tests
Pretty much all businesses understand the value of writing when marketing – but they also recognize that it can be very difficult to get right, or even to get feedback on. With Intelligems, it’s incredibly easy for Shopify merchants (or any website owners) to AB test their copy and track how it impacts their customer engagement and conversion.
While using Intelligems, we load a “Builder Mode” at the top of the site. Once you enter this mode, you can literally click on any piece of copy and substitute it with an alternate version. Once you’re happy with it, we set up the AB test, and help you measure which version resonates best with your customers and generates the most conversions. While it may seem simple enough, creating this solution required a complete revamp of our “builder mode” (the above blue widget in the GIF) that took all summer – the underlying technology has a lot of moving pieces. After tons of refining, we are confident that this is the slickest solution out there!
Image Tests
As you’ve surely heard before, a picture is worth a thousand words, so don’t forget to experiment and test which images resonate most with your customers. Image testing is one of our newest features (and is also unique to Intelligems). Using Intelligems, testing your images is very straightforward and we sync directly with Shopify’s CMS – all you have to do is click an image on your site, and pick which version(s) from your gallery that you want to AB test it with.
Once your test is live, when customers land on your site they’ll automatically be sorted into a group and see your different image versions. Intelligems also handles all the data tracking, and lets you see which segment generates the highest conversions, revenue, and profit in your dashboard.
The average e-commerce store has thousands of images across their site, so there is a ton of room for experimentation here. Try testing images on your PDPs, home pages, collection pages, the list goes on. Setting up image tests is a quick and easy process – and we have a free trial offer now – time to get testing!
PDP Layout and Template Tests
Your PDP is probably the most critical touchpoint between you and your customers – so it’s definitely worth taking advantage of this feature. With Intelligems, you can AB test your PDP layout by changing the content, layout, and UX of the page. To do this, all you have to do is set up redirect tests in our app and use Shopify's view parameter to create different versions of your PDP.
As with all of our tests, you get real-time metrics that show you which yields the highest conversion rate. We've seen brands like Dossier and Public Rec see the value of making sure to use your screen real estate to effectively convey their brand messaging and product value – which helped improve UX, and increase AOV and conversion.
HTML Edits
Shopify stores are diverse and complex, which means that most businesses will want to experiment with adding different customization options, whether that be a new social proof section to your homepage, a new upsell in the cart, or a change to your navigation. This is where Intelligems’ HTML editor – the “swiss army knife” of our content testing toolkit – comes into play. With Intelligems’ on-site HTML editor, all you have to do is point and click on any element you’d like to edit, and make your change for each variant you’re testing, all in one place!
This tool is a great way to test different variations of UI/UX components, like a carousel or nav bar. You may get a report from Oddit or Enavi on components to change, or be working with an agency like Endrock, ConversionWise, or FuelMade – these tools unlock nearly any change you can imagine.
Personalized Discount Links with Intelligems Campaigns
To risk sounding like a broken record, discounts are an incredibly powerful tool for all brands when used correctly. They create urgency for customers to make a purchase, help boost revenue, and let you clear out old inventory. At Intelligems, we’ve tracked data across over 1,000 Shopify stores, and have seen a huge increase in demand and use of discounts in the past few years. In other words, customers are becoming more price sensitive and elastic. If you’re using site-wide discounts, you’re probably spending too much. These kinds of discounts are hard to test and measure to see if your promotion is actually providing you with any incremental profit. If you’re using discount codes, you’re asking your customers to dig back through their inbox to find the code and running the risk of code leakage. With Intelligems’ Campaigns feature, you can send targeted discount links that automatically apply at checkout:
Target your offer to whichever customer segments you’d like, reiterate the offer to that segment on-site, automatically apply the offer, and AB test to measure the true impact of your campaign. Like all Intelligems testing features, get all the metrics you care about for each campaign through the Intelligems app.
Test a Gift With Purchase Offer
As we’ve plugged in some of our previous blog posts, a gift with purchase offer can quite literally be the gift that keeps on giving (when used correctly!). GWPs help brands increase AOV, cost less than dollars and percentages off, maintain your brand image and value, and even help you move excess inventory. With Intelligems Campaigns, you can easily test different GWP offers. Maybe you want to try having different gifts for your loyal customers and your new customers. Maybe you want to try offering one GWP to some customer segments and two for others. Maybe you just want to see what your threshold should be. There is no singular strategy here – which is why testing is critical.
With Intelligems campaigns, you can easily test different GWP offers to see which strategy performs best. As always, you can get all the metrics you care about in the Intelligems app – perfecting your discount strategy has never been easier. With Black Friday/Cyber Monday just around the corner, now is the time to be perfecting your strategy!
Abandoned Cart Flows
While some of the above examples highlight how Intelligems campaigns can help you perfect your discount strategy (whether it be comparing dollars and percents off or testing a GWP), they can be equally as valuable to help you drive purchases for customers who failed to follow through at checkout. With Intelligems Campaigns, you can send custom discount links to customers who abandoned their carts at checkout and iterate to see which discount yields the best conversion rate and profit. You can also track the test in real time on the Intelligems Analytics Dashboard.
A great recent example is one of our client’s – Branch Furniture – who plugged Intelligems Campaigns into their abandoned cart flow and saw an 80% increase in conversion, 70% increase in profit per abandoned cart, and more than doubled their ROI. Our team at Intelligems also worked with Branch to set up their emails in Klaviyo to make sure that the correct emails were sent to each test group.
Time to Start Testing
While the above 10 tests are great ways to help you maximize your conversions, profits, AOV, etc, Intelligems supports a wide variety of tests and personalization tools to make sure you’re getting the most out of your tests. From our tried and true pricing/shipping/discount tests to our newer image tests – Intelligems has your Shopify store covered.
Content Testing
Ecommerce Strategy
AB Testing
